A well-designed menu can be a great communication, cost controlling marketing tool. In fact, menus are often called the “silent salesperson”. When the restaurant staff sits down to design a menu, they must make sure to keep their ideal customer in mind while also focusing on cost efficiency to create profit. With the right design, the menu can directly advertise what a restaurant wants to sell by making certain items stand out to customers and increasing sales revenue. Good menu design can, and will, manipulate customers into ordering certain items without them even knowing it, thus positively impacting the restaurant’s bottom line. Here are actually a few simple tricks restaurants can do to increase their sales!

They use clear section headings and easy to find dish titles to make menus easier to scan

They analyze your reading patterns. Diner’s eyes are drawn first toward the upper right-hand corner of a menu. This ‘sweet spot’ is where they will place an item that they want to sell most.

They emphasize certain items with ‘eye magnets’.

Color is used to influence diner’s feelings and emotions.

They use descriptive language to make items more tantalizing and appealing.

They don’t use dollar signs in order to soften pricing and encourage customers to order based on ingredients, quality or other reasons besides cost.

They don’t place prices in columns, but rather place them inconspicuously under item descriptions.

I decided to choose this topic because I am a hospitality major and I have a lot of knowledge about menu design. Most people don’t actually know that a well designed menu increases the chance for a restaurant to survive. The menu is the first thing people physically hold and view when they sit down and once they see it, they can truly get a feel what they to expect from this meal. Even something as small as a description of an item or the font provided on the paper can sway peoples opinions on a restaurant. I truly believe its important for people to understand why a well designed menu is important in the restaurant industry, which is why I decided to share it in this blog!

Hello and welcome to my blog all about restaurants and the importance of their menus! When you think of the restaurant industry, what do you think is the most important aspect to its success? A lot of people think it’s the ambiance of the room or the quality of the food, but in reality, the most important aspect of a restaurant’s success is the menu design. A restaurant’s menu design is the most important internal marketing and sales tool. It not only directly influences what a customer will order, but ultimately how much a customer is willing to spend. In this blog, I intend to teach you all the ins and outs of how a well designed menu can really increase restaurant profit and how it can bring a ton more customers in!